Sharing best practice from clinical leaders in urgent and emergency care

We have worked with senior clinical, nursing and managerial leaders from emergency departments at 17 hospital trusts across the country to develop a best practice resource for all NHS acute trusts.

Published yesterday, “Meeting the quality challenge; sharing best practice from clinical leaders in emergency departments”, provides practical examples of positive action that some trusts are taking to help meet the challenges of managing capacity and demand.

The practical resource is the result of a workshop held earlier this year, which brought together 36 senior clinicians and managers from leading trusts where we have identified good practice in the emergency department; clinicians discussed the challenges and shared solutions that they are using to meet them.

Professor Ted Baker, Chief Inspector of Hospitals, said: “There is no doubt that urgent and emergency services are under increasing pressure with attendances rising year on year, and the need to treat older patients with more complex needs now a constant requirement.

“Despite these challenges, our inspections have shown that many hospitals are providing good and outstanding urgent and emergency care and have demonstrated their ability to plan for and cope with increased attendances.

This resource provides practical examples and strategies that are being used by staff in emergency departments across the country to help manage risk and provide high quality care. By sharing these examples of best practice, we hope that staff in all hospitals can learn from them and adapt them to support improvement in the quality of emergency care for their own patients.”

The examples cover a range of areas including ambulance arrivals, initial patient assessments, staffing, managing deteriorating patients and specialist referrals. Each example has been mapped to the appropriate key question that we ask on inspection and the relevant key lines of enquiry (KLOEs) from our assessment framework for healthcare services.